Welding systems can have a number of various devices for performing and monitoring welding operations. In many cases, it would be desirable for the various devices to communicate with each other. For example, in gas-shielded tungsten arc welding (GTAW) systems, the system can include a power supply that supplies the welding current to the tungsten electrode and wire feeder to supply the consumable to the welding arc. In such systems, it can be beneficial for the welding power supply to know the wire feed speed in order to properly set the welding current to the tungsten electrode. Similarly, if the GTAW system is set up for hot wire welding process, it can be beneficial for the hot wire power supply to know the wire feed speed in order to properly set the heating current that resistance heats the feeder wire. Further, the above system can include motor drives to move the workpiece and/or the welding head as the welding progresses. In such cases, it can also be beneficial to start and stop the motor drives based on, e.g., whether the welding power supply is operating. Accordingly, communication between the various welding devices can promote efficient welding operation.
However, in order to communicate with external welding devices, especially PC based devices that use standard operating systems such as Windows, MAC, Unix, Linux, etc. (e.g., a monitoring and/or control device such as a PC, workstation, digital tablet, cell phone, etc.), each of these welding devices requires device drivers that use the same communication protocol as the other welding devices. Unfortunately, the device drivers may not be loaded or be at the same revision level across all the welding devices. Accordingly, unless all the welding devices are loaded with compatible device drivers, some or all of the devices may be unable to communicate with each other or the communications may be very inefficient. In addition, even if the welding device drivers are compatible, some welding devices may include application software and/or components of application software that need to be uploaded to the other welding devices before the system can work as designed. Typically, each welding device comes with its own set of disks (e.g., CD ROMS) that are loaded with device drivers and application software/components. An operator can then manually load the drivers/software onto the other welding devices. However, managing the device drivers and software for a plurality of welding devices can become cumbersome, especially if the disks are misplaced or located in a remote location. In addition, the operator may not know that device drivers/software were not loaded on a particular welding device until welding operations are set to resume, thereby causing delays and inefficiencies.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such approaches with embodiments of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings. It is noted that although much of the following discussions will reference “welding” operations and systems, embodiments of the present invention are not just limited to joining operations, but can similarly be used for cladding, brazing, overlaying, etc.-type operations.